• Tag Archives Amiga 2000

  • Commodore Amiga 500, 1000 & 2000 (1987)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment



    https://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/190612229973/yodaprod-commodore-amiga-500-1000-2000-1987



    The Amiga 1000 was first introduced in 1985 around the same time as the Commodore 128. It contained a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.16 MHz and 256Kb RAM. It had graphics and sound capabilities unlike any other computer available at a time at a price that was quite low given the features. The Amiga’s closest competition was the Atari ST which shared virtually the same CPU. While the Atari ST was a good bit cheaper, it had less sophisticated graphics and sound capabilities and a less sophisticated OS. Amiga was ahead of its time with all of these things.

    Two years later in 1987, Commodore introduced two successors. The cost reduced Amiga 500 and a more expandable Amiga 2000. The Amiga 500 was an all-in-one unit with the keyboard and a 3.5″ 800k disk drive built-in. It was almost half the price of the original Amiga 1000. Though it was less expandable, it contained double the memory of the Amiga 1000 when it was first introduced and was in every other way just as capable. This is the model that competed most directly with the Atari ST and would me the most popular Amiga model and the spiritual successor to the Commodore 64.

    The Amiga 2000 on the other hand was very expandable with a total of 9 expansion slots as well as 2 3.5″ and 1 5.25″ drive bay. It also came with 1 MB of memory instead of 512k. With the addition of a Video Toaster and the appropriate software, tt would become a very popular video editing platform.

    The ad above is from 1987, probably shortly after the release of the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 as the Amiga 1000 was discontinued later the same year. I’m not sure the origin of the ad (I found it on Tumblr) but I suspect it is from Canada or Australia as the dollar amount doesn’t match what the cost was in the U.S. An Amiga 2000 with 1MB of RAM and a monitor was $2395 at that time in the U.S. and the Amiga 500 was $699. By comparison, a complete Commodore 64 system (which is what I had) was about half the price of the less expensive Amiga 500.


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  • The Commodore Amiga 2000

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The Commodore Amiga 2000

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/171824830828/retrocgads-usa-1988-amiga-2000

    When I had my Commodore 64, the Amiga was the computer I always dreamed of upgrading to one day. By the time I actually got around to upgrading, Commodore was almost dead and it just didn’t seem like a wise purchasing decision as I was going off to college. I bought a 486 DX2-66 instead. No regrets but I still wish I had that Amiga back in the day.

    The Amiga 1000 was the original model released in 1985. It featured a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 processor along with 256 KB of RAM, custom chips for graphics and sound, and a custom multitasking OS called Amiga OS. It was not a cheap machine but it was an incredible value for what you got. It was succeeded two years later by two models: The Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000. The core hardware mentioned above was still the same in both with 512 KB now being the standard amount of RAM on the Amiga 500 and 1 MB on the Amiga 2000. The Amiga 500 was by far the most popular Amiga model. It was a cost reduced all-in-one unit that was popular with home users. It had the same basic abilities as the Amiga 1000 at a much lower cost.

    While the Amiga 500 was the most popular Amiga for home users, it was probably the much more expensive and expandable Amiga 2000 (in the 1988 ad above) that made the Amiga a success in the professional world, particularly for video production, editing, special effects, and other video uses. While the Amiga 2000 started with the same core hardware as the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500, it was much more expandable, containing five Zorro II expansion slots, four PC ISA slots as well as easier memory and CPU upgrade options. It also included two 3.5″ and one 5.25″ drive bay.

    The Zorro II slots were designed for the Amiga and provided a buffered extension to the Motorola 68000 bus. Zorro II cards used a protocol called Autoconfig that automatically assigned resources without jumper settings. This was similar to plug-and-play with PCI cards but was developed well before that. There were a vast array of Zorro II cards (a list of nearly 300 can be found here: http://amiga.resource.cx/search.pl?intf=z2) including network controllers, digital signal processors, graphics cards, SCSI cards, memory cards, and of course the immensely popular Video Toaster for video editing and just about anything else you can think of. Various PC bridge cards with processors ranging from the 8088 to the 486 were also available. These combined with the ISA slots in the Amiga allowed it to also become an expandable PC. The best part was that you could run DOS (or Windows) programs in an Amiga OS window so you weren’t restricted to only running one or the other at the same time.

    In addition to these expansion slots there was also a CPU slot used for CPU upgrades. There were two offical Commodore expansions for this slot as well as a variety of third party options. The original 68000 could be upgraded in this manner to a 68020, 68030, 68040 or even 68060. These boards often had their own RAM expansion capabilities.

    The Amiga 3000 eventually succeeded the 2000 but the Amiga 2000 was on the market for four years until 1991. Several variations were available during that time including the Amiga 2000HD which included a 3.5″ SCSI hard drive and controller, the Amiga 2500 which was an Amiga 2000 with Commodore’s A2620 68020 CPU card and hard drive, the Amiga 2500/30 which was an Amiga 2000 with Commodore’s A2630 68030 CPU card and hard drive, the Amiga 2500UX which was a unix variant with a tape drive, and others.





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